Not a day goes by that I don't hear from someone who's in the middle of some kind of account recovery process that isn't working.

While I try to help out to the degree that I can – usually with instructions that are often no more than the service provider's instructions translated into clearer English – it's also not at all uncommon for those accounts to never be recovered.

Never.

And, to be super blunt about it, most of the time, it's the account owner's own fault.

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Viruses and spyware and worms … oh my!

The very concept of "internet safety" is almost an oxymoron these days.

It seems not a day goes by that we don't hear some new kind of threat aimed at wreaking havoc across machines connected to the internet.

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Phishing is the attempt to represent one's self – typically via email – as someone or some organization that you are not, for the purposes of maliciously acquiring sensitive information.

The most common examples of phishing emails are carefully crafted to appear as if they had come from a banking institution, directing the recipient to a web site which itself looks very much like the bank's official website. The catch is that the email is not from the actual bank, and the website is a forgery. By fooling the visitor into thinking that the site is legitimate, the phishers can obtain that person's log-in credentials when they attempt to log in to this fake site.

Some very poor yet surprisingly successful phishing attempts don't use web sites at all, but simply portray themselves as a major online service in email. The email requests that the recipient reply with account information, often including username and password, for some made-up yet important-sounding reason.

I received an e-mail from my state senator's campaign office, looking for a contribution, that said, " we noticed that you have been opening our e-mails but have not responded to them recently". I used to respond to some of them, until they started coming from names I did not recognize. So I would use view source to see where they came from. When I saw it was from the senators office, I started just deleting them without opening them. Are we going to find out the government does have a way to tell if we are opening our e-mails or not?? Or were they just guessing, or bluffing?

Connie (Team Leo) writes:

Any good email sending software has the ability to track if emails have been opened, if any links have been clicked, and if the email has been replied to. It's not foolproof. For instance, an email can be opened but even the best tracking can't tell if the human being actually read it.

So it has nothing to do with government surveillance. It's just the state of the technology. It's used in businesses all the time as well.

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